OCR AS Psychology: Core Studies - Loftus and Palmer (1)

Loftus and Palmer (1)

Background: Memory can be defined as capacity to retain and store information. Many early studies (e.g. Bartlett 1932) demonstrated how memories aren't accurate records of our experiences. It seems we try and fitpast events into our existing representations of the world, making memory more coherent or that it makes more sense to us. Memories of an event aren't minute-by-minute but they're more of a reconstruction of the event. This reconstruction comes from 2 sources: Actual memory of the event plus and info received after the event.

Elizabeth Loftus is a leading figure into the field of eyewitness testimony research. She demonstrated how leading questions can distort a person't memory of an event. A leading questions is a question that suggests what answer is desired or leads to a desired answer.

Aim: To investigate how info supplied after an event (in the form of a leading question) influences an eyewitness' memory for that event.

M&P: 2 lab experiments; both examples of an independent measures design. IV in both experiments is the verb used. The DV in the 1st experiment is participant's speed estimate and the DV in the 2nd experiment is whether or not the participant saw broken glass.